In my views of game theory, I largely follow Ariel Rubinstein: game theory is a set of fables. A collection of heuristic models that helps us structure how we make sense of and communicate about the world. Evolutionary game theory was born of classic game theory theory through a series of analogies. These analogies are either generalizations or restrictions of the theory depending on if you’re thinking about the stories or the mathematics. Given this…

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It was Friday — two in the morning. And I was busy fine-tuning a model in Mathematica and editing slides for our presentation. My team and I had been running on coffee and snacks all week. Most of us had met each other for the first time on Monday, got an inkling of the problem space we’d be working on, brainstormed, and hacked together a number of equations and a few chunks of code to…

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While November 2016 might be remembered for the inauspicious political upset likely to leave future historians as confused as we are, a more positive event transpired in tandem – the 6th Integrated Mathematical Oncology (IMO) Workshop. I was honoured to take part as a member of Team Orange, where we were tasked with investigating the emergence of treatment resistance in CMML. Unlike many other cancers where the evolution of resistance to treatment is well understood,…

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Last week, I revived the blog with some reflections on open science. In particular, I went into the case for pre-prints and the problem with the academic publishing system. This week, I want to continue this thread by examining three common arguments for preprints: speed, feedback, and public access. I think that these arguments are often motivated in the wrong way. In their standard presentation, they are bad arguments for a good idea. By pointing…

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This is the 250th post on the Theory, Evolutionary, and Games Group Blog. And although my posting pace has slowed in recent months, I see this as a milestone along the continuing road of open science. And I want to take this post as an opportunity to make some comments on open science. To get this far, I’ve relied on a lot of help and encouragement. Both directly from all the wonderful guest posts and…

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Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about small projects to get students started with evolutionary game theory. One idea that came to mind is to look at games that have been analyzed in the inviscid regime then ‘spatialize’ them and reanalyze them. This is usually not difficult to do and provides some motivation to solving for and making sense of the dynamic regimes of a game. And it is not always pointless, for example, our…

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